The Welfare of Animals Part 9 pptx

Many experiments do not use the correct number of animals to test their

hypotheses (McCance, 1995). Two thirds of articles published in the Australian

Veterinary Journal, for example, show statistical flaws, and nearly 10% used

too few animals to prove or disprove their hypothesis (McCance, 1995). The

work may still be useful to be published if repeated experiments can be linked

through a statistical combination of several experiments, or meta-analysis

(Phillips, 2005b). However, inadequate attention to statistical design leads to

wasteful use of the animals in research.

The process of ethical approval by institutional panels is time-consuming

and sometimes underfunded, relying largely on volunteer labour and a skeleton

staff for administrative and clerical matters. However, it has the advantage over

governmental processes in that some recognition is given to the views of the

public and those members of activist organizations concerned about the welfare

of research animals. The failure of some institutional ethical review processes to

include members of the public or activist groups, such as the new ethical review

system started in Iran (S. Aldavood, personal communication), will need to be

addressed if it is to be credible internationally.

The processes can be accelerated by using documented standard procedures,

which can be referred to in applications. In theory, this should give more time

for discussion of the ethical merits of the work, but in practice it is likely that

this will still be assumed to be acceptable. There’s also a risk that the assessors

will be desensitised to the procedures by seeing them referred to just as a code or

reference number, and they may not adequately consider the relevance of the

procedures to the specific experiments being evaluated. If they are used, these

documented procedures must be regularly reviewed, so that when an improved

technique becomes available its use is rapidly made known.

After these general considerations concerning the welfare of laboratory

animals, it is pertinent to consider two contentious and relatively new areas of

research that are likely to have a major impact on animal welfare.

Genetic Modification of Organisms

Genetic modification of animals has been pursued by man ever since they were

first domesticated (Uzogara, 2000). Initially, the objective was to select animals

that were best suited to the environment. In the last 50 years, however, with the

industrialization of livestock production, the objective has moved rapidly

towards economic goals, with the focus on increased productivity. Although

genetic modification is not new, the speed with which changes can be introduced

has been accelerating and the knowledge base has increased. Animal modifica￾tions are now conducted with some understanding of the changes at gene level,

whereas in the past selection was based on phenotype alone. As the genetic

constitution was unknown, progress was slow, but the phenotype could be

expected to lie somewhere between the most extreme expression of the selected

180 10 Animals in Research

trait and the normal phenotype of the population. The traits selected for were

usually multilocus and therefore extreme results were rare. However, now that

the genes themselves are deliberately targeted, and the expression is often

improperly understood, extreme results are more common (Sillence, 2004).

Hence the research can be conducted with a danger of producing phenotypes

that could potentially release unwanted genes into the environment. As the

precise functioning of the genes is often uncertain, and the modifications are

targeted at an array of possible genes, the animals produced could be at risk of

congenital welfare problems. Some will have high morbidity, and be susceptible

to a variety of physiological complications. In addition, the very low success

rate of many genetic modification programs, for mice at least, gives cause for

concern about the ethics of the procedure. Sometimes, in large experiments with

several hundreds of mice, the offspring will all be euthanased or they may not

reach maturity, because of malfunctions and morphological complications, or

because they failed to produce any suitable modification and are redundant for

the experimental purposes. The standard production of GM mice in the labora￾tory therefore poses a major ethical dilemma as to whether large numbers of

animals should be used in a production process with high mortality rates.

If the production of GM animals for laboratory research is contentious, so

too is their utilisation in agriculture. Genetic modification of crops that are

produced to be resistance to specific diseases or to be able to withstand pesti￾cides and herbicides, to avoid the crop being contaminated with pests and

weeds, respectively, is less morally questionable (Knight, 2007). An ability to

tolerate pesticides and herbicides may actually reduce the volume of these

chemicals required (Uzogara, 2000). These objectives may be laudable, but

the long-term impact on the native flora and fauna is unclear. The impact in

particular, on soil micro-organisms, which are at the start of the food chain, has

received inadequate attention (Toro et al., 1998). Although most investigations

have found little evidence of danger to humans, animals or micro-organisms of

the production of genetically-modified crops (Toro et al., 1998), experimenta￾tion at Cornell University with the ecologically-valuable Monarch butterflies

demonstrated the potential for their larvae to be killed by genetically-modified

corn (Dively et al., 2004).

Genetical modification of sentient animals is more contentious, and early

experimentation demonstrated the potential for welfare problems, because of

the uncertainty of the phenotype. Some animals were genetically modified for

increased growth and had problems with their leg joints, because farm animals

have already been selected for rapid growth and other productive traits. Selec￾tion for cattle with a double muscling gene, which has a high prevalence in the

Belgian Blue breed, directs growth preferentially to muscle and away from fat

deposition and basic organs (Clinquart et al., 1998). The size of these animals

and their high level of muscularity make them difficult to join with conventional

cattle breeds without producing large foetuses, which require parturition by

Caesarean section (Webster, 2002). Nevertheless, the search for genes con￾nected with increased growth and production has accelerated in the last

Genetic Modification of Organisms 181